


Thoughts and Prayers

by Tammany



Series: The Sussex Downs [20]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Awkward Conversations, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 19:56:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20802095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: This is a case of the characters--a character--grabbing the reins and running away with the work.If I were writing this as a serious portion of a novel or short story, I would probably cut this and paste it in a separate file, and see if it ever turned out to be useful. Things like this seldom are useful except to clarify my own thinking. But--Sussex Downs is such an odd little kraken of an AU. All weird tentacles and googly eyes and vast room for the most unexpected interactions. John is surly, as Aziraphale accidentally not only hijacks the afternoon John had planned, but does so while imposing some cosmological realities on him he'd rather not face, thank you ever so very much.John would be happier in a universe where God was an idea Good Men respected, but didn't exactly have to get too seriously involved in, and one could waffle around between socially appropriate secular faith, agnostic faff, and outright atheism, depending on mood. It's rough being faced with angels and demons and having to take the question of God seriously.





	Thoughts and Prayers

A Study in Pink

SHERLOCK: Yeah, but if you were dying ... if you’d been murdered: in your very last few seconds what would you say?  
JOHN: “Please, God, let me live.”  
SHERLOCK (exasperated): Oh, use your imagination!  
JOHN: I don’t have to.

It was a good afternoon, John thought. Rosie was committed to her very first sleep-over in their new town—a friend from a summer library program. A birthday party. Rosie was totally blissful.

John was free to be…John. To be the man he knew himself to be. A soldier. A doctor. Sherlock’s pack-mate. Rough around the edges. Sarcastic. Often outright vulgar, when it pleased him to throw the world the bird. Here he was, out at the place by the beach—big home above, little cottage lower down the slope. No one was there today but Sherlock. He and Sherlock were out on the back patio of the cottage, with the beach just beneath them. They were drinking beer, because, as Sherlock said, “It’s simple. Leave Mycroft and Greg and the Celestials to muck around with fruit juice and shot glasses and paper umbrellas…” Sherlock was pretending to not miss his drugs and his cigarettes…and his woman.

“Janine’s back at her place, getting chapter seven written. Told me if I went with her she wouldn’t get any writing done.” Sherlock failed to look anything but smug. “She says she can’t think when I’m around.”

John rolled his eyes. He still found it nearly impossible to believe in Sherlock and Janine and romance and marriage plans and…

“You’re not pranking her again, are you?”

Sherlock looked down his long nose with the affront of an offended heron. He said nothing, allowing his eyebrows to cover it all.

“Yeah—but really. You’re not, are you?” John scowled right back. “Wouldn’t put it past you, you berk.”

“You dislike the idea that I am not some special, solitary beast. The unicorn only you can tame.” Sherlock shrugged. “I’m afraid I am less mythical than all that. If you want the legendary and arcane, go next door. If you stay here, all you have are a sorry collection of lonely men who decided that solitude and longing were a remarkable waste of potential. And…in Janine’s case, when she’s here, the sorceress who worked some magic on one of them.”

John rolled his eyes again and shook his head. He struggled to hold off from gagging. “Oh, right. Is she going to turn out to be a spy, too? Like…” He couldn’t say it. He didn’t know if he would ever heal from Mary. Mary, the lover. Mary, the wife. Mary, Rosie’s mother. Mary, the spy. Mary, the liar. Mary—the lost.

Sherlock gave him a side-eyed glance, face dispassionate. “If she was, she was a superb one. If she remains one—she remains one under cover, living in a most un-spy-like cottage two towns over, by a dairy farm. I have trouble seeing her reporting back on daily herd movement and milking volume, myself. Right now, she is a writer…and a successful one.”

“Yes. But what is she really?”

“How do you define ‘really,’ John? She gets up, she writes. She edits. She finishes manuscripts. She submits. She writes again. By every standard I know, that makes her a writer.”

“Le Carré. Ian Flemming. Hell—Christopher Lee…”

Sherlock huffed. “Yes, yes. Roald Dhal. Julia Child. Alice Sheldon AKA James Tiptree. The list goes on. ‘People who spied on the side.’ That does not change the fact that most of them were far more realistically something else for most of their lives, John. People change.”

“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” The cheery, light tenor came down from the path above them. Aziraphale, dressed in white chinos, classic tan sandals, and an ultra pale vapor-blue polo shirt with a pink and white button placket and collar lining, smiled down at them, sunlight glowing in his fair hair and turning it into a halo shot with miniature rainbows. “People do change.”

“You don’t,” John said, jaw jutting. “Celestial, you, yeah?”

Aziraphale’s face was the perfect image of stunned amazement. “Of course I change! Everything changes. Except God, and she’s…ineffable.” He pouted. “Sometimes I think she changes, too. But then I wonder if it’s not just a change in perspective on my part. May I join you? Your beer looks quite refreshing.”

Sherlock nodded. “Got an entire selection in the fridge. Go on in and grab what you like, then join us.”

John tried not to sulk. He’d been enjoying the old bachelor-style camaraderie with his old friend. But—Aziraphale wasn’t the worst sort.

“What are you two gentlemen doing today?” Aziraphale asked, chirpy and twee and sparkling with good will and social insecurity. He pulled a chair meant for lounging up to the table, and sat gingerly upright on the front edge of the seat, holding his beer bottle with a grip that suggested he’d wanted to go looking for a glass, but had chosen not to because “when in Rome, do as the Romans.” John and Sherlock were contentedly fisting their long-necks, and by Jiminy, Aziraphale would, too.

He wouldn’t have lasted a week of boot camp, John thought. Fish out of water.

“We’re watching the sea,” Sherlock said. Then, perfectly straight faced, he continued, “We don’t want it to sneak up on us.”

Aziraphale frowned. “Well, barring a tsunami,” he said…then tittered. “Oh. Yes. Sorry. It’s been awhile since I did much…bonding. Give me a bit, I’m sure I can get back in the swing of it.” He bounced slightly, and raised one arm, declaring, “Beware the Jabberwock, my son!” Then he glanced at Sherlock. “That sort of thing, right?”

“It will do for a start,” Sherlock said, face still straight. “What are you doing, Ang…Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale gave an edgy smile, that quivered at the edges. “I’m not entirely sure. I’ve been thinking of going back to London and checking on the store, today. But…” His eyes were worried and sorrowful, suddenly. “Crowley, dear boy, doesn’t want me to go alone. Not with Gabriel and the High Holies still trying to work out how to get around God’s apparent acceptance of Earth continuing—and trying to put me and Crowley back into our places.” He sounded more than a little bitter about that. “And he’s not in the mood for London today. He’s trying to find a place sheltered enough from the salt wind to grow a kitchen garden. At least…that’s what he said.”

“You’re not convinced?” John drawled.

“Of course he’s not convinced,” Sherlock snapped. “Crowley’s a demon.”

Aziraphale considered. “Well, yes…but that’s not precisely it. Crowley’s in a mood.”

John, looking at the twittering, wittering angel sitting prim as Rosie, feet crossed, knees together, spine straight as a ruler, eyes huge, could not imagine his live-in not being in a mood. Never a chance to kick back. Never a chance to be yourself. What must it be like to live with an angel, of all things?

“So there really is a God,” he asked, letting the topic drift.

Aziraphale sipped his beer—then picked restlessly at the bottle label. “There’s Herself,” he said. Then, “To tell the truth, we’re not of us entirely sure if she’s God—or if God’s even a thing. She…she guided creation. Of Earth, at least. Some of the other solar systems. Maybe all of them. Or not. We don’t know, really.” He shrugged. “We came on the scene late. Just a bit before the solar system.”

“Four billion years plus?” Sherlock asked.

“Smart arse,” John growled. “When did you decide it was worth knowing when the universe started.”

“Solar system, John. Don’t confuse things.” Sherlock sniffed, for all the world as though he’d never been ignorant of the fact that the earth orbited the sun.

“Erm…” Aziraphale blushed pink. “Looked at from a Celestial point of view? Roughly six thousand years. Give or take a bit. I’m told it can be reckoned down to the second, if you care.”

“Six thousand?” John squalled. “Six. THOUSAND?!”

“More or less. Strictly from a Celestial viewpoint, though. I’m told that there are several billion worth of fictious time when you measure from the human view point.”

“Fictitious time.” John felt something cold and angry settle into his bones. “Fictitious. Time.”

“Yes?” Aziraphale clearly felt the fury rising, and didn’t know what to do about it. “You are a created world and a created species, after all. There’s quite a lot that’s boilerplate and filler. The things that aren’t important, unless She changes her mind and edits a bit.”

“Edits?”

“She decided in favor of the dinosaurs, as I understand it, during the Apocal…A few years ago. She ran headlong into the will of another being who thought dinosaurs were…nifty. I think she could have won, if she’d set her mind to it. As it was, she was apparently happy enough to a lot a substantial amount of fictional time to Earth, just to make room for diplodocus and T. Rex.” He considered. “She got Her own back, though. Adam was not impressed to learn that chickens were real dinosaurs. He’s not yet mastered Her sense of humor.” He gave an edgy little chuckle, and said, “Not that any of us have. Unless. Sometimes I suspect Crowley has a little instinct for it. He says She is an Iron because she keeps committing ironies.”

Sherlock and John both studied the angel. John felt that if he had not seen wings on both the demon and the angel, he’d have just walked away in disgust. He still wanted to. He’d liked God better as a court of last resort. Someone you prayed to when all hope ran out. If you lived, you decided it was luck, not God. But you respected the idea…and felt good knowing there were real people out there more gullible than you, upholding standards.

He did not really like this new world, with God who might not be unchanging, beyond her ineffability.

Actually, he liked God better as a ‘He,” if he was going to bother bitching about it.

“You’re sure she’s a female?” he asked, and was unhappy to hear a helpless whine in his own voice.

Aziraphale shrugged. “Um…wrong question?”

“She’s like you—any and none.” Sherlock sounded pleased with himself.

“More like all, always—and none of our business regardless? It’s not relevant. What we see is just a sort of…it’s a dramatized material form standing in for something that won’t even fit in the material world. Not as it is… I don’t think it does gender except as a storytelling device.”

John’s fists were getting tighter and tighter. “And we’re supposed to worship this ineffable whatever? Even though it sounds more like some kind of Elder God in a Lovecraft story? Cthu-hovah. The god behind the curtain…”

Aziraphale shrugged. Then he gestured with one hand, taking in all the world around, and them as well. “But…” He sounded so sad and small. “But she does such beautiful work,” he said, softly. “And she lets us tell such amazing stories inside it. Our own stories. She even lets us change her own work.”

“Tell that to the dead,” John growled, and slammed up from his chair, rage quivering through his body, feeling like his entire day was wrecked. A lazy, predictable afternoon of playing bachelors with Sherlock was now full of God (in whom he did not want to believe any more than he had before he met an angel and a demon) and fictional time, and Earth as a created thing, and God as someone who let you fanfic within her own greater narrative, and he had an angel and a demon he could not deny and did not want to admit…and somewhere in all that were the dead on the battlefield, and the dead in the operating room, and Mary, bleeding out to save Sherlock, gone before the EMTs could arrive with compression dressings and blood and plasma and saline solution and treatment for shock and all the things John knew how to deploy if he’d had it—but he hadn’t, and Mary had died.

She’d died before he’d ever managed to complete his story with her and reach any kind of real resolution. His wife. His lying wife. The mother. The spy.

“Is there an afterlife?” he growled at Aziraphale. “At least tell me there’s an afterlife. That this wonderful collaborator really does give us time after to fix all the things that break in this life. Tell me that much.”

Aziraphale stared up at him, helpless. After far, far too long, he shrugged. “I don’t really know,” he said, voice fragile with pain. “Even Celestials—end. Angels die in hellfire. Demons in holy water. You can kill us with flaming swords. Or with a devil’s pitchfork. Or She can…end us. As for humans? I’ve seen ghosts. But I’ve never seen anyone in our part of Heaven. They say—they say it’s written that the good shall rise and live in Heaven. But it hasn’t happened yet. Or if it has—we haven’t witnessed it.”

“Well isn’t that charming,” John spat out. “No knowing.”

Sherlock quiet on the other side of the table as the tension had risen between his friend and the angel, said, softly, “Ineffable, John. Don’t kill the messenger. I doubt he enjoys it much himself.”

John huffed, and stomped to the rail of the terrace, looking down into the crashing sea. It was high tide, with the surf just kissing the sand below the slope down. After a long wait he said, “I wonder if it’s ever high enough to go fishing from here.”

“It is,” Sherlock said. “I caught a flounder once, off this terrace. As a boy. I made Mycroft help me kill it and dissect it. Then Mummy made me eat it for tea, because ‘you don’t kill what you won’t eat.’”

“I’m sure you loved every bite,” John said. Then shot his friend a wry, grateful grin for the path back into conversation that wasn’t all divinity and disappointment. “Bloody minded git, you.”

“Flounder is lovely with a Mornay sauce,” Aziraphale said. “Or a lemon and parsley beurre blanc.”

“We just grilled it over oak,” Sherlock said. “And threw the guts to the minnows. But it wasn’t bad.”

“Yes. Well. I suppose I should be getting back,” Aziraphale said. He lifted the bottle. “Do you mind if I take this with me? I’m not finished yet.”

“Consider it yours,” Sherlock drawled. “Come back again. Mycroft and Greg will be home later. Janine won’t be back until day after tomorrow, I think. But I’ll be here.”

“And Rosie? Is she coming out to join you? Crowley does love to see Rosie…”

“She’s at an overnight,” John said. And didn’t say that for all the advantages of angelic and demonic godfathers, he preferred Rosie associate with giggling little girls with princess tiaras and stuffed toy unicorns, if she had to get legendary at all.

“Ah, well,” Aziraphale said…and drifted away, a stray beam of sunshine lost on the wide Sussex Downs.

“You are a bit of a hedgehog,” Sherlock said, after the angel passed out of what seemed like polite speaking range. “Have you been taking lessons in social behavior from me? If so—it’s a bit not good, John.”

John grumbled. “If I hadn’t seen the wings…. If they hadn’t rescued Rosie… I would rather think they were con artists, Sherlock. Or—maybe they’re aliens, out to sucker the dumb Earthlings? Or they’re both demons tempting us to believe in total cloud-cuckoo land? I mean—six thousand years of ‘real’ history? Fictional time? She only decided to let dinosaurs be real a few years ago, to please someone who liked them? It’s not reasonable.”

“And human understanding of reality is always so very, very reasonable,” Sherlock drawled. He stretched out long in his chair, legs extended, feet crossed so that one heel hooked over his arch, while the other dug into the slate flags.

“It’s not fair,” John said, temper finally breaking. He flung his beer bottle far, far out into the churning surf. “It’s not fair!” He shouted it to the sky. To the Heavens. To…God.

“Tell Her that,” Sherlock said, softly. “But—to me? Say ‘I wanted it to come out different.’ Or better, just ‘I miss her.’”

John toppled back down into his chair, then, and folded his arms, and buried his face, and pretended not to be crying.

Sherlock sighed, sadly. After a long time he said, “He prays, you know. Not the angel. You’d expect it of the angel. The demon prays, too. Out on the beach, for hours. He shouts at her, too—like you.”

“I can’t see why,” John snapped, face still in his crossed arms. “He’s got what he wanted, doesn’t he?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. And if he does—at what price?” Sherlock considered. “I just—whatever she is. However it works. There’s more there than nothing. And even the demon needs to talk to More Than Nothing, sometimes.”

“Doesn’t sound like they know any better than we do,” John pointed out.

Sherlock considered. After a time, he said, “Perhaps they know just enough more,” he said. “Enough to pray more than just ‘Please, God, let me live.’”

John, who would never forget those first days with Sherlock, grunted, recognizing his own words.

“I was in a hell of a situation, then,” he said.

“Yes. But…you lived.”

“I might easily have died. Most people who pray the same prayer do.”

“All of them do—eventually.”

John nodded.

But he said a prayer that day, before he went to sleep. It was not polite, or grateful, or worshipful. It was angry and tired and full of demon-like questions. But he prayed—and he would not have been surprised to learn that Sherlock did, too, turning rock anthem after flame-bright rock anthem coming over his headphones into his own attempt to storm heaven with mortal longing and conflicting dreams.


End file.
